


The Weight of the World

by PrincessBethoc



Category: Holby City
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-13
Updated: 2019-08-13
Packaged: 2020-08-20 21:49:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20234926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrincessBethoc/pseuds/PrincessBethoc
Summary: "With the weight of the world resting on my back; and the road on which I've travelled is as long as it is cracked; but I keep pressing forward with my feet to the ground; for a heart that is broken makes a beautiful sound." ~ 'The Things I Regret' by Brandi Carlile.Henrik Hanssen has a hole in his heart, and the world is getting in.





	The Weight of the World

**Author's Note:**

> I've had this sitting in my laptop for a while now, and I've only just had enough time to sort it out and post it. The joys of daily cross-county travel.

There’s a hole in his head.

Or maybe it’s in his heart.

Wherever it is, it allows the worst of his world to seep in. Or does it allow the best of him to trickle away until he is a husk of what used to be a person?

He stares at the steering wheel; half an hour is altogether too long to have been sitting motionless in the driver’s seat of his car, but what else can he do? His existence is relentless. It just won’t give up. It won’t let him breathe. Why won’t the universe give him just one breath of clean, untroubled air? Yes, he inhales trouble. The air enters his lungs in restless pockets of fear and worry, and it never processes into anything else. It never transforms itself into relief, or even indifference.

How he wishes he could be indifferent.

He once was fairly skilled at feigning indifference; plenty of people would have labelled him as _aloof_ or _cold_ or _dispassionate_. Some have criticised him for it. Others have praised him for what they mistake to be professionalism. There are a few, though, who have learned that it’s all a lie. This is what happens when people come to know – and subsequently understand – one another.

His gaze lifts from the steering wheel up to the building that towers before him. Only now does he see that he ought to have taken his first day here as an omen. It had been the day of Linden Cullen’s funeral – he had been killed by a blow to the head with a bottle, had he not? But Henrik Hanssen had barely given that a second thought; he cringes now at the echoes of the glib, insensitive remarks he had made to Connie Beauchamp that day.

What if he had known how many catastrophes would follow? Would he have run for the hills? He likes to believe he has more guts, more backbone, than that, but he knows his own failings. His own blind spots. Some of these disasters have been aided on their way, if not caused, by his inadequacies. Everything he touches, he seems to make it so much worse.

And yet, he is still here. He might not be exactly the same man, but some version of him sits here with his eyes on that same building he had first entered all those years ago. He wants to believe he can bear the weight, but his track record blazes in neon at the forefront of his mind. How many times has he fled? How many times has he hidden? How many times has he simply made the wrong decision? Can he really be trusted? Can he be trusted to be who he knows he ought to be?

A doctor.

A surgeon.

A CEO.

A colleague.

A friend.

A grandfather.

A good man.

Was he ever a good man? Do good men desert their pregnant partner? Do they show up on their first day in a job and make sarcastic jibes about a man’s funeral? Do they run to their homeland when life gets messy? Do they father a killer? Do they let one best friend kill the other, blind to the evil that lurks in front of them? Do they find themselves so uncertain of how to be a decent grandfather? Shouldn’t the right thing to do come naturally to him if he is a good man?

A small voice in his head, soft and familiar reminds him, though, “You regret those things. Some of them even broke your heart.”

That is true. He does regret them. Perhaps that is the reason they are the only things he can seem to remember. But regret doesn’t make it any less real. Those things still happened.

“Not all of those things were your fault, Mr. Hanssen. How could you have known what Fredrik would do? That was him, not you.”

But he was – is – Fredrik’s father; something of that depravity must have come from him, or else from his complete absence in Fredrik’s upbringing.

“You _know_ that is not true. Fredrik was a grown man. He made that choice. Nothing you could have said or done would have changed that.”

Was. He’s dead.

“Yes. You gave him the opportunity to give himself up. You gave him the chance to stand down and survive. He didn’t take it.”

And then there’s John Gaskell, who wreaked havoc upon this hospital and its staff – his colleagues and friends – while he obliviously defended his oldest friend. The man who killed Roxanna, and he had been too blind, too naïve, to believe it until it was far too late.

“You think you’re to blame for John Gaskell? You think that madness didn’t exist in him before you even met?”

What if it hadn’t, though? What if he put it there himself, just by having the man know him? What if when Gaskell had dragged him from the water, he had transmitted his own madness to him like some dreadful waterborne disease?

“Now you’re just being ridiculous.”

And all those times he had jumped ship. Ran to Sweden. Ran anywhere he could find. After the non-referral scheme disaster. After the car accident. After the shooting. All those times he ought to have been here, fighting for everyone who needed him.

“And what about all the times you didn’t?”

Like when? Running is his specialism, after all.

“When Tara died. You stayed. You did what you could.”

Not enough, though.

“It was as much as anyone else could do. More than some.”

And it had been partly his fault, had it not, since he had supported Tara in having surgery?

“It was a tumour. It would have killed her either way. You can’t take responsibility for cancer. Illness doesn’t take orders any more than unhinged people do. They just _are_.”

There must be some form of accountability, though.

“No. You don’t get to take the weight of the world onto your back, Mr. Hanssen. You don’t get to hurt the people around you by doing that.”

Henrik turns and looked at the man in his passenger seat. There sits Arthur Digby. Sure he has finally completely cracked up, Henrik blinks hard. Once, twice, thrice…Arthur does not leave. He’s been dead for years now, yes, but he’s still here. “Arthur?” he asks cautiously.

“Yes, Mr. Hanssen?”

“You’re dead.”

“Yes. Quite difficult to avoid that fact while parked across the road from my memorial.”

“Then-”

“You’re not going mad. I think you know that. You know what madness feels like by now.”

Henrik frowns. If he’s not going mad, then why is he seeing dead people? “What are you doing here?”

Arthur smiles slightly. “Someone needs to tell you what you’re doing to yourself. It’s not good for you. For anyone, really.”

In the moment, Henrik almost throws Arthur out of the car. However, if he isn’t really here, how can he possibly be thrown out? “I’m not doing anything to myself.”

“You are. You know you are. I wouldn’t be here telling you this if you didn’t know that.”

Henrik smiles wryly. “So you _are_ in my head,” he replies.

“Of course I am,” Arthur says. “That’s the only rational explanation for my being here.” That makes Henrik less nervous; at least if he knows it’s all in his head, he isn’t really going mad. “That hole in your head, or your heart, Mr. Hanssen – how do you think it got there?”

There’s a moment in which Henrik can be honest with his own memories. That hole started as a single pinprick when he was a child. When his mother had walked into that water and died.

When he wrote his father off as dead for his use of research data obtained in Nazi concentration camps, that had been another pinprick. Another way for the world to get in.

Every blow he takes, every mistake he makes, is another pinprick. They merged long ago, to create one huge gaping hole. Now the pinpricks only widen that abyss. “It’s everything,” he says slowly. “It’s me. I’m too easy to wound.”

“No, you’re not,” Arthur contradicts him.

“I must be weak.” He adds to himself that he has long known that, though he doesn’t often admit it.

“Nope.”

Henrik glowers at him. If he knows the answers, why is Arthur grilling him like this? “If I’m not weak, then why have I ended up with this hole?”

Arthur turns his body to fully face Henrik. “What is it you like us all to think you don’t do?” he demands impatiently. “Why did Connie Beauchamp call you a ‘depressing giant Swede’ when she resigned from Darwin?”

“She thought I couldn’t feel,” Henrik murmurs. “I pretend I don’t feel things.”

Triumph reigns freely on Arthur’s face. “Exactly! It’s a lie! It always was, wasn’t it?”

Defeated in this battle, Henrik leans his head on his hand against the driver’s side window. It’s always going to come back to this, isn’t it? It will always be that he has no true shield; guarded as he is outwardly, he knows all too well that it’s all a part of the game he plays because he never could understand quite how the world works.

Love and life and death…it’s all a black hole to him. It’s confusing and painful.

And therein lies the problem: he feels pain.

Sometimes he wonders if he experiences pain differently to others. Most people show pain almost involuntarily when it’s too much. The rest of the world knows when they need comfort. But Henrik’s pain, it bleeds inwards. It doesn’t just bleed. It cuts deeper and deeper until-

“You feel everything to the bone, Mr. Hanssen.”

Henrik looks back at Arthur, loath to admit that the dead man is speaking the truth.

“That’s not a bad thing,” Arthur adds hastily. “It just means you find it harder to heal than other people. And that’s okay, as long as you know how to heal in your own time. You blame yourself because you need a reason for feeling it all in your core. It isn’t your fault. You’re just wired that way. I think you know when the blame is yours to take and when it isn’t – it’s just that it all gets pulled in at once. And being broken, Mr. Hanssen, that just means you know what it looks like. You know what those around you are going through when they’re in pain. It’s a beautiful thing, really, that you’re…well, _you_,” he explains. “You shouldn’t change. You need to cut yourself some slack and see things as they are.”

The sound of knuckles rapping the driver’s side window makes Henrik jump. When he looks through the glass, he sees Jac Naylor staring back at him. He lowers the window. “Are you alright?” she asks.

He hesitates, glancing at the passenger seat. It’s empty. “I’ll be fine,” he says.

“Henrik, ‘I’ll be fine’ and ‘Yes, I’m alright’ are not the same thing,” Jac tells him sternly.

The realisation that he has been sitting here for far too long, talking to someone who isn’t there, hits him. To try and say he is okay would be laughable. “I’m not quite alright, no,” he confesses, “but I will be.”

Jac doesn’t trust that, and Henrik cannot blame her. But he knows her. He knows she has been in this place; she has been anything but alright, and has been left to work out how to recover. She knows it can be done. “Just take it easy, okay?” she says. There is a kindness in her voice that is extremely rare for Jac Naylor. Henrik cannot take that for granted. She pats his shoulder and walks away. He puts the window back up.

The passenger seat is empty. Henrik is full to bursting point.

To be empty, though, would be a waste of his life. Pain, love, confusion, anger, joy – it’s all what life is built on. It _is_ life. And Henrik knows better than to try and change that.

Kindness, after all, is as much for himself as it is for everyone else.


End file.
